Everyone has a fictional character they looked up to as a child. The kind of character they liked so much that they never seemed to get sick of their movie or want to take off their costume. Maybe it was Batman or Superman, or perhaps Cinderella or Ariel. Whether they were from a fairy tale or a comic, a cartoon or a novel, most likely, they were white. This is because there is a complete lack of POC representation in the media.

This isn’t to say that there are no nonwhite characters for children to look up to. But if a young white girl loves the Disney princesses, she can probably pick out many that look “just like her”. For a young black girl, there is Tiana. A young Chinese girl has Mulan. This sends a strong message: Yes, you too can be a princess—but it’s not very likely. When only four out of eleven of the official Disney princesses (Mulan, Jasmine, Tiana, and Pocahontas) are non-white, it won’t take much for a young child to believe that their skin makes them less worthy of being royalty.
Many more franchises suffer from a lack of representation. Take Marvel’s Avengers franchise. The Avengers themselves are all white, and five out of six are male. In the Avengers movie, the only main POC character is Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Yes, he is a powerful character as the leader of the Avengers. However, he is not a main character, and he is not known as the hero of the story. The “heroes” are predominantly all white men. This seems to say that only white men can be the center of action, the savior, or the hero. How will this make any child of color, or any girl, feel when they watch the movies or read the comics?

Another community that is vastly underrepresented in media is the LGBTQ+ community. When a LGBT character is introduced, it will usually be a gay, white, cisgender man. Take the Stonewall movie trailer. Rather than centering on Marsha P. Johnson or any of the other black transgender women at the forefront of the movement, the movie trailer focuses on a cis, white male that, according to the director, was created for straight viewers, rather than the LGBT community that the movie should be catered to. This is blatant ignorance towards a vast and greatly ignored community of LGBT women and POC that deserve much more representation. Furthermore, any sexuality other than gay or lesbian is almost completely ignored in media. Bisexual characters are treated as indecisive or confused, and assaulted with questions like, “So you’re gay now?” or “I thought you used to have a boyfriend.” The word “bisexual” is rarely uttered other than as the butt of a joke. Asexuality, pansexuality, demisexuality and many more sexualities are hardly even heard of in the media. The lack of representation for the LGBTQ+ community, especially sexualities other than gay or lesbian, is just another example of the complete lack of diversity in the media.

Whitewashing is another issue that leads to less diversity in the media. Whitewashing is when a white actor is cast as a character that is either racially ambiguous or canonically nonwhite. Take, for example, Katniss Everdeen. Described as having olive skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, she could have easily been nonwhite. Having a nonwhite protagonist in a major franchise like the Hunger Games would have been an amazing way to give people a diverse, strong female lead to look up to. However, she was made white instead, like the many other YA protagonists that are popular today. Even worse is when a canonically nonwhite character is made white. In the upcoming Pan movie, Tiger Lily, a Native American girl, was cast as Rooney Mara, a white woman. Even worse, Devery Jacobs, a Native American actress, auditioned for the role of Tiger Lily, and was turned down in favor of a white actress. In a world where the amount of Native American characters is already so small, to turn one of the few into a white woman is completely disrespectful, both to the talented Native American actresses who could have played Tiger Lily and to the millions of Native Americans who deserve to see their race represented in the media.

What does all of this lead to? People become used to differentiating between the faces of many different white men, but having two nonwhite characters of the same race gets confusing because they “look so alike”.  If the amount of female characters gets to maybe half as many as the male characters, people get uncomfortable with the overload of women, unaware that what seems like way too many is actually not nearly enough. We take in so much media that we start to become unaware of what really needs to be changed. This is my call to become more aware. Take note of the diversity in your media. Do it for the black girl who dreams of being a superhero, and the transgender boy that doesn’t know there’s a word for what he is, and the Asian girl who wishes that her eyes were as wide as the eyes of her Barbie dolls. They deserve to see themselves reflected in their favorite stories. They deserve the chance to be the hero.